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In light of the spam issue on its social networking platform, Google has announced that it's rolling out a new tool for community moderators. Dubbed "Remove, report, and ban," the company hopes that this will help to curb the swill problem on Google+.

Here's a Google Home trick we haven't seen really publicized: the Assistant in Home can play you a six-note scale in any key. (Note: This does not seem to work on the Pixel Assistant. Sigh.Correction: See update, this is just really broken in general, unfortunately.) Just tell Home to play you any key - for example, "play me a B sharp" - and the Assistant will respond with an ascending six-note scale. Neat.

Each of the major social networks has evolved to place emphasis on something that they have excelled beyond all others. Twitter is the king of what's current. Facebook is all about planning events and staying in touch with family and friends. And despite a constant narrative about its impending doom, Google+ has become one of the best places for actual content creators to share their work. Photographers, writers, chefs, and other adventurous, interesting, and creative people have come together to share their passions.

Yesterday, Google announced a new program called Google+ Create that will fuel this trend by featuring great collections and the people that put them together.

Google+ is a pretty great social media platform - it allows content of all lengths, many types, and it presents in a readable, ad-free way. But not everybody uses Google+, and that's understandable, we've all got plenty of social media in our lives at this point, and Google+ is just another platform to keep track of. But sometimes you want to share a great Google+ post, and if you were to do that on your Android device, that meant just copying a link to the post to your device's clipboard. Not ideal, necessarily, given that Android has literally been built upon sharing content between various apps seamlessly and with as few taps as possible.

It looks like Google is performing some surgery on the Google bar, the familiar toolbar that appears across the top of many of Google's web properties (including Chrome's new tab page). Until recently, the bar held a G+ sharing shortcut, a profile switcher, an "app drawer" to switch between Google products, and a link shortcut to your Google+ profile.

Today it looks like two of those things have been axed - specifically the Google+ link and the sharing shortcut.

Of course, while "Google+ is dead" sentiments have been floating around virtually since the service's inception, we'll resist the urge to speculate about the rationale behind removing Plus-specific functionality from the bar for now.

According to a tipster (and a report over at DroidLife), Google is testing a new feature for Google+ that could be big news for the platform. For now, it's called "Collections," and it's being tested for an unspecified release target.

The basic idea behind Collections is curated content sets - like Pinterest boards or Dribbble buckets, users could curate pieces of content into their collection, with others viewing, sharing, and following those collections as they please.

Here's a look at a collection (note that Derek Ross is not our source - the tipster simply sent a screenshot of a collection including posts by Ross.)

We also got a look at what posts from a collection look like on mobile - they're designated with a subheader containing the name of the collection.

Update: As pointed out by several commenters, this option has been there for a while, but appeared new to many of us, including me (my screenshot of the old Google+ app's Folders section that I posted in the original article shows that the cloud icon wasn't visible to me). I reinstalled the old Google+ app to make sure I wasn't missing anything and upon further investigation, figured out the problem. If, like me, you had the "Backup local folders" option unticked, your folder list didn't offer any cloud on/off icon and you would not have known that selective backup was a possibility. If, however, you chose to backup all your folders, then the folder list would show you the cloud icon.

Google+ got a somewhat unexpected bump to version 4.6 today, an update that brought with it plenty of Material touches. Since we first reported on Material Design (at the time known as Quantum Paper), we've expected that Google's own apps would be undergoing their own gradual transformations in updates leading up to the launch of Android L. The Google+ app got its first round of material changes earlier this summer, but today's update starts its journey through the last mile.

The first thing you'll notice is the new launcher icon, which carries the characteristic long shadow and slight dimensionality of Google's other "material" launcher icons (like the new Play Newsstand icon, for instance).

There have been a lot of leaks lately, and they don't show any sign of slowing down - Yoel Kaseb (via Google+) has shared screenshots of what he claims to be a test build of a redesigned Google+ app. According to his post, the build is unstable and probably unfinished, and he has since been locked out from accessing or using the APK. But what we can see from the screenshots Kaseb managed to capture is both compelling and in line with some of the other leaks we've seen recently. It may also be worth mentioning that Kaseb is verified on Google+.